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Ephesians 2:10 – For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

If you have not already, please say The Salvation Prayer, not to “become a Christian” and join any religion but rather to be saved from this wicked world with all its sins, from your own sins, and from the lake of fire. Now that it is taken care of, fellow brethren, do not be misled regarding the purpose for which God selected and pre – ordained you according not to your worth or potential but rather to God’s Mercy, Love, Grace, Will, and Everlasting Glory. The level at which you attain, accept, seek, and walk in this knowledge will determine how much of an overcomer you will be. This knowledge may not cause you to do more for God, but it will affect the way you approach your work. It may not lessen your trials and tribulations, but it may affect your attitude while you experience them. It may not speed up or increase your spiritual development, but it will help you understand why spiritual development is necessary in the first place. This knowledge will help free you from the bonds of the religious system and whatever limitations exist in your own mind. It will help you glory in your weaknesses and attribute to God your strengths. It will help you stop thinking that you would be so much better for God if only you were like this person or that person, and instead focus on what a blessing it is to be you. You will cease to be concerned about what could be done, what should be done, and what needs to be done and instead accept that what you ARE doing at any particular time is usually what God wants you to be doing.

And what is this knowledge? Quite simply, it is your job description. You know your job name, which is Christian. You know your job qualification, which is to accept salvation through the Christ whom God raised from the dead by faith alone. And you know your job requirements, which is to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and to love thy neighbour as thyself. But do you know your job description? If not, let me inform you. Your job description is not to tell others about Christ. Your job description is not to represent Christ. Your job description is not to emulate Christ. No, your job description is to BE Christ. The difference? You can tell others about Christ without knowing Him yourself. You can represent Christ in some areas and at some times but not others. And the way in which you emulate Christ can be a function of your own interpretation. And the breadth and depth to which you pursue, accomplish, and apply all of those depends upon your own level of commitment. Because of that, you can never truly succeed at telling people about Christ, representing Christ, or emulating Christ … but you can never truly fail either. Why? Because though you are serving God, you are ultimately in control of the manner that you do so, and you are your own judge. You will never judge yourself to be an utter failure – because you won’t be – but in your heart and spirit you know that you are not being a total success. It is not because of sin or failure per se, but rather the knowledge that you are not doing all that you can. And no, it is not “doing the best that I can” … it is that your best is never good enough. In order to truly offer God your firstfruits, you cannot offer God yourself, you have to offer Him God. Now this may confuse you, because under the old covenant they had their various sin, wave, peace, burnt, praise, etc. offerings. Well that is because under that covenant, it was rare to have the Holy Spirit indwelling: a privilege given only to prophets and the like. So, it was impossible for everyone else to give God Himself because they did not have it to give. But now in these latter days because of the life, death, and resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, God has poured His Spirit out upon all flesh that has called upon the Name of and received salvation through that same Christ. So, it is now possible for us to give God Himself back; by giving back of the Holy Spirit that is ever present inside of us. That is why where under the old covenant you only had to give 10%, under the new covenant you have to give 100%.

But the only way to give 100% is to never give of yourself. And the only way to accomplish that is if the self ceases to exist. As long as “you” exist, your mind, will, and emotions that rule your physical existence will conflict with the Holy Spirit that rules your spirit man. Now your spirit man is the real you, the part that will exist forever either in Heaven or in the lake of fire. But your spirit man is encased in a physical body, and your physical body inhabits the natural world. So, the physical body is going to rule under ordinary circumstances. Even when it does not rule, as it does not for the Christians who are trying to please God – whether by spirit and truth according to truth or by religion according to practice – it is going to exert influence. Either way, it is an enemy of God. What the Christian has to do is to willingly consistently submit to God and ask Him to accomplish within the Christian Psalm 110:1 – “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” So many of us think of this in terms of Satan, wicked nations, or evil rulers. They do not think that their own flesh is something that HAS to be placed under the footstool of Christ. They know that it is an enemy of Christ, because it suborns sin and rebellion against Christ. Yet, their opinions of themselves are so low that they do not consider themselves worthy of consideration by God in weighty, prophetic matters like this. However, before the end of this world comes and a new heaven and a new earth replaces it, Psalm 110:1 will be accomplished with regards to EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL THAT EVER HAS LIVED OR WILL LIVE. Now, as for the people who reject Christ, it will be simple: their spirit men will be cast into the lake of fire. For those who accept Christ but only partially commit themselves to Him, their flesh will be placed under Christ’s footstool at the time that they die and the two – edged sword called the Word of God accomplishes the task of separating the soul from the spirit man (Hebrews 4:12). But for those few who accept AND totally commit themselves to Christ in spirit and in truth, the Word of God will actually come alive in them. Those people will actually eat the Flesh and drink the Blood of Jesus Christ. When that happens, the Word of God living inside them will make the will of the flesh completely subject to the Will of the Word, and Psalm 110:1 will have been accomplished with that person. Now, will it separate the flesh from the spirit man? No, you will always have to deal with the flesh (I Peter 2:11). The only question will be how you deal with it.
If you remain you, then you will always have to contend with and war against your own flesh, and you will be double – minded, always having to parse between what you want and what God wants. But if you DIE TO YOURSELF, then you will be dead to your own flesh and its desires and alive to the Mind of God that is ever with you by virtue of the Holy Spirit. That is not to say that you will not be aware of or tempted by it, but rather when you are being tempted, you will KNOW that it is a temptation. A person who has not died to self will honestly not be able to discern his own will apart from the Will of God, and will not know right from wrong (his right hand from his left hand) concerning a matter unless he first consults scriptures and/or commits a matter to prayer. You are like a person who is trying to change his eating habits, not so much to lose weight but rather to attain a healthier mindset where food does not hold so much of a power over you. Until you win that battle, you will be constantly asking yourself: “Do I want that donut because I am hungry, or because I want to eat something? If it is because I want to eat something, do I specifically want the donut, or will an apple do?” At this point, faith and obedience do not even enter the picture, because it isn’t a matter of whether you will do what God asks of you, but whether you will even KNOW what God asks of you. Now, a person who has won the battle over his eating habits will eat small portions on a regular basis regardless of how hungry he is, and will only eat what he deems to be appropriate regardless of what he wants to eat. Why? Because he has placed his eating DESIRES under subjection to his eating WILL. Such a person will eat when he is not hungry, forgo food when he is hungry, and deny himself what he truly wants to eat (except on “special occasions”) because he cares not so much about his appetite cravings as he does healthy eating habits, and so has made what is truly important to him the master of his eating.

The same principle applies spiritually. The main difference – and it is a big one – is that you are not choosing one portion of your own will or nature over another … it is God’s Will overpowering your own will. And it is not you who accomplishes this, but rather God who accomplishes it. Why so few Christians achieve this is because they believe that they have to choose what seems righteous to them over what seems unrighteous or less righteous themselves, and that they have to enforce that choice with their own power. They do not know that they are giving up their will entirely, including their own notions of right and wrong, which are generally planted in them by their religion, culture, upbringing, experiences, etc. for God’s Righteousness and God’s Desire and Plan for His Righteousness to be accomplished on earth as it is in Heaven to be accomplished at the time and place in the manner and within the person that He chooses. And they also do not know that they lack the power to do this thing with their own will; and even if they did God would not want them to anyway. God does not want those who make themselves righteous so that they can then turn around and think and talk about how they do not need God! No, God wants to make us righteous so that we will give Him the praise and the glory, and also so we won’t mess things up. So, we have to realize that this is done in us by God, and accomplished only when we realize by faith that it is done already, and the only barrier has been our lack of faith, our lack of submission (not obedience but submission), and our willingness to heed the lies of Satan when he tells us that we have to go out and do this thing or that thing to be righteous, when we are actually only being self – righteous or religious. Satan knows that he cannot stop all the righteous acts in this world, so he instead busies himself keeping Christians from trusting that God will work on them and use them and instead doing what they feel that they ought.

Do you die to self daily? Some say no, some say yes. It depends on what you mean. Should you each day dedicate yourself to allowing God to accomplish Psalm 110:1 within you? Yes! Do you persecute yourself on the basis of some perceived sin or shortcoming? NO! Quite the contrary, you should actually GLORY in your weakness and shortcoming. Your becoming Christ is not hindered by your imperfections. Quite the contrary, it is ENHANCED by your A) recognizing your shortcomings and B) not doing a thing about them because God can use us despite them anyway, because He is God and He can do anything! It is man’s thinking that the better you are, the more you can do. You go around thinking “Oh, if only I read my Bible more” or “Oh, if only I prayed more” or “Oh, if only I had more patience” or “Oh, if only I witnessed more.” When you are doing that, you are comparing yourself to some human ideal. Whether it exists in some other Christian that you have viewed in action and your flesh envied, or whether it exists in your own notion of your own perfection that came out of your flesh’s vanity, it is still YOU who want this improvement done, and not to please God but rather so that YOU can feel better about yourself as a Christian: so that you can glory in your own flesh and have others glory in your flesh (Galatians 6:13). It is only when you stop trying to improve yourself and stop beating your breast persecuting yourself in prayer and fasting and asking God to improve you and then realize that God can use you to do whatever HE wants DESPITE (or because of?) your imperfect flesh because though your FLESH is imperfect your SPIRIT MAN is perfect because your SPIRIT MAN HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE SUBJECT TO THE FATHER BY THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, then THAT is when you start the process of becoming Christ: when your vain desire for self – improvement dies and your desire to love God no matter how ugly, scarred, smelly, and messed up you are begins. Now what about the perfecting influence of the Holy Spirit causing your will to be under Christ’s footstool? That comes later; that is spiritual maturity. But the beginning of spiritual maturity is not the notion that you have to get to where you think that God wants you to be before you can serve Him the way that you think that God wants you to serve Him; rather the beginning is you serving God right now where you are doing what God wants you to do. Even if you are filled with confusion and doubt and are double – minded towards the whole thing, even if what God has you doing right now seems unfair or incorrect to you, you still have to accept and do it so that the process can begin. Once the process begins, you can start accepting and claiming by faith that it is already done.

Do not be mistaken: Paul went through the same thing. Paul had this “thorn in the flesh”, and begged God to remove it from him so that he could serve God from his own notion of self – perfection that he acquired from a lifetime of trying to follow the law and failing. So, he asked God to remove it so that he could serve God from where he wanted to be, and God said “No, serve me from where you are!” Paul even went through this stage where he wanted to do right but could not, and what he thought was right turned out not to be right at all (Romans 7:15 – 17). But what was going on was God’s Spirit working on Paul. God could not do what he felt was right, because what he felt was righteousness (under his expectations of the law) was not the righteousness that God wanted from him. So Paul concluded that he was a failure and that his only hope was to give up his expectations and notions of righteousness and perfection (according to the law) and just do what God wanted of him. We must do the same, except that where our notions of righteousness come from religion.

It seems to be an interesting paradox; a conundrum of sorts: that which you have to do (subject your will to the Father) is something that you cannot do and should not even try to do. And also, the way that you implement your desire to improve is not by exerting effort to improve, but rather by exerting no effort at all and serving God right where you are in your unimproved condition. This is indeed something that makes absolutely no sense according to any sort of human logic or values. Indeed, it sounds like what a lazy person who is uninterested in living for God would say! One reason is that this runs so completely counter to religious thinking, especially this totally counterproductive “Christian self – help” movement: all of the “Power of Positive Thinking” or “The Purpose – Driven Life” or “Your Best Life Now” or “Enjoying Everyday Life” or “Taking Authority” or “Kingdom Living” stuff. Now do not get me wrong: these things can help Christians that are so spiritually immature, are living under so much condemnation, and whose mind and vision are so thoroughly clouded by the lies of demons that they are so totally paralyzed that they cannot move. Following a ministry like this is not a first step, but rather a first step to a first step. It is through a ministry like this that you first begin to break free of the demonic strongholds and start believing in the love and power of God and becoming convinced that God has a plan for your life: it is ministries like these that convince so many Christians for the first time that the Bible is actually true. Before you go through some of these Christian “12 step programs”, you may SAY that you know that the Bible is true, and you may THINK that you know that the Bible is true, but you do not BELIEVE that the Bible is true and are not CONVINCED of the truth of the Bible until you are free of enough chains holding you down and corruption influencing the way you think, pray, read your Bible, and commune with God (if you do at all) until you spend some time in a ministry like these. And I am not criticizing these ministries or the people who run them: that may well be their role in the Body of Christ, and even their broad – based mass appeal approach is something that allows God to use them to rescue a large number of Christians from diverse backgrounds and with diverse needs very quickly, often without these people ever needing to set foot in their church.

But once you get past walking to the first step and actually TAKE the first step, you really do have to unlearn all of the, for the lack of a better term, spiritual immaturity that you have learned. You have to learn not to trust your feelings, not to try to improve yourself, not to push yourself to do more and try harder, and to really just sit back and let God work. You have to really accept that the cliché “God loves and accepts you just the way you are” is true, and therefore stop trying to pretty yourself up for God. If it weren’t such a serious problem, it would actually be hilarious how so many Christians send themselves to charm school, to resume school, to interview school, complete all the continuing education credits, fill their wardrobe with interview suits, and compile all these glowing recommendations from impressive references in order to get where they think they need to be so that God will hire them WHEN THEY HAVE THE JOB ALREADY. And that is what Satan wants; he wants you to focus all your effort on trying to get what God has already given you, because if you realize what God has already given you then you will stop working for God and instead start letting God work for YOU. That just sounds so lazy, doesn’t it? It sounds arrogant. How dare you think that you can sit back and let God wait on you, maybe bring you a glass of chilled bubbling grape juice and some lamb pate on crackers on a platter? Well let me break it to you: God’s ALREADY done it. Remember when Christ washed the disciples’ feet? That doesn’t even BEGIN to describe all of the things that God did for you that you couldn’t POSSIBLY do for yourself when He took your sins to the cross. And it also doesn’t describe how, when you DO die to self, the Holy Spirit will take the burden of telling you which hand is your right and which hand is your left (or right from wrong) so that you won’t have to rely on your own value system or on some man – made religion. Again, for the person seeking maturity in Christ, the biggest stumblingblock isn’t whether you will obey God, but whether you will even know God’s Will for you to obey it!

So go ahead. Accept your job description: to be Christ. Know that you cannot live up to that job description on your own, that you have already failed, and further know that you recognize your own failure is a good thing, and that if you do not try to fix the failure because there is nothing to be fixed: things are the way that they are supposed to be, then even better still. Know that the reason why you fast, pray, and read your Bible is NOT so that God will fix some flaw in you, or that God will give you the faith and strength to carry out His Will, but rather A) to intercede for others and B) to probe the mind of God so that you will know His Will and be certain in it. Pray that your will shall henceforth be made subject to His. Do not ask how, try to find out how, or look for a role model in the church or even in the Bible, because this is not accomplished by finding out how and going out and doing it. Rather, it is accomplished by BELIEVING and letting GOD do it. Simply by knowing that this is what God wants of you and BELIEVING that it is being and has been done, you should see and feel a difference. How? Well, Satan and his demons will rise up against you and tell you that it is all a lie! And that is when you know that it will be done, because of course they wouldn’t be provoked to action to deny or distract you from the change if nothing was going on! So be encouraged, meaning let God encourage you. And be faithful, meaning filled with faith. Becoming Christ by dying to self and thereby allowing your will to be placed under the footstool of Christ so that God’s Will can take its place by virtue of the Holy Spirit indwelling you is a process, but all it takes to start the process is to accept that you are right where God wants you to be and can use you right now, and to believe that the reason why you are at this position and God is using you in this way is PRECISELY BECAUSE this is where and how God wanted to start the Psalm 110:1 within you. So right now, claim it by confessing it with your mouth, believe it, and praise God for it because it is done: you are Christ because the Word of God is living within you!

Prayer:

Father God, in the Name of Jesus Christ, your children attain becoming Christ by the Word of God living in them by doing nothing other than accepting by faith that it is done already, not in spite of their spiritual condition and their flaws, but because of it, since it is by YOUR accomplishing this within them DESPITE their shortcoming that YOU and YOU ALONE receive the glory. In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen.Deliverance:

The demon that works in this area is false teaching. Because of it, people do not know what God expects of them (which is to become Christ) or how to attain it (by through no action of their own other than letting God do it all, 100% of it, for them, and that God WANTS to do this in people who are not upright and perfect but rather who are flawed so that God may be given the glory and His Love and Power may be made manifest … as a matter of fact the more flawed the better because the more glory goes to God!) And the false religion demon is at work too, causing people to think that “the better you are the more like Christ you are” instead of knowing that becoming Christ (as opposed to becoming “Christ – like”, why be an imitation when you can be the real thing?) is accomplished only by God through faith right where a person who is saved through Christ is. And of course, the failure to be sufficiently “good” and thereby “Christ – like” through works (though they may seem spiritual and charismatic they are still works) causes condemnation and self – condemnation demons to work in people. Please read the Basic Spiritual Warfare guide to learn more about how to go against these demons to help set captives free and win battles in the name of your God through the power, authority, and victory given to you by his Son Jesus Christ and by his blood shed for you!